


Missing Variables

by Wallwalker



Series: Repentance [2]
Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/pseuds/Wallwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard didn't do what Miranda had expected her to do on Lorek, leaving Miranda wondering what she could have possibly missed... until the Illusive Man steps in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Variables

Miranda had been wrong.

She knew very well that staring at her private terminal wouldn't make the last mission report change into something less jarring. She knew that she had been awake for far too long, and that she needed to sleep if she wanted to be at her best for the next mission. But she couldn't sleep, and all she could feel was the cold prickle of apprehension on her skin as she reread the message.

She'd been wrong. Not for the first time, maybe, but this was a very serious thing to have been wrong about. Project Lazarus was the most important thing she'd ever done, and she had intended for it to go off without a hitch. She had intended to rebuild Commander Shepard perfectly, both in body and in mind.

She had succeeded in the smaller details. The new Shepard was indistinguishable from the old Shepard, at least in outward appearance. Too close of an examination by advanced medical scanners would tell a different story, but only if the scanners had been very powerful, and configured to pick up the cybernetic signals that they'd worked so hard to mask. Her speech patterns, her voice, her mannerisms... all were virtually identical to the woman she had been. But Miranda had wanted more than just outward appearance. She had wanted to duplicate Shepard physically, mentally and morally. And the report summary from the mission she'd led on Lorek made it clear that she had not succeeded, not entirely.

The first line of the message read, _Cerberus operative Tyrone Rawlings was found dead._ No surprise there. The man that the Eclipse mercenaries had believed was Rawlings, the man that they'd been hired to interrogate, was actually a minor operative who had gotten on Miranda's bad side, not terribly long ago. And true to form, the mercs hadn't spent too much time figuring out who had paid them. They would have been shocked to learn that the one who had ordered them to capture and interrogate a Cerberus operative had been one of their senior operatives herself.

It was the second part of the message that concerned her. She kept coming back to it, troubled by the implications: _Encrypted data transmitted to Alliance for decryption._

No. The Shepard that Miranda had worked to bring back would _not_ have done that. She shouldn't have done it. It didn't make sense.

Her psychological analysis had been flawless. She felt like she knew the commander more intimately than anyone else could have known her. She knew how lonely her childhood had been at times, raised on ships and stations, a military brat with a strict, unemotional father and a loving but often absent mother. She knew that she'd formed few connections with children her age, and for many years had hidden herself away and indulged in a childhood talent for the clarinet, one that she had mostly abandoned when she joined the military at the age of eighteen. It was ironic - a slightly different childhood, and Natasha Shepard might have been a musician, not one of the Alliance Vanguard. The galaxy was full of such ironies. She knew how stubborn Shepard was, too - how hard she'd fought to follow in her father's footsteps and fight on the front lines, when her commanding officers had looked at her mediocre close-combat skills and her extraordinary biotics and had done their best to railroad her into the alliance's Adept Corps. But she had refused advanced long-range biotic training and had trained so hard it had almost killed her; eventually they hadn't had a choice but to allow her to train in the Alliance Vanguard, even though none of them had expected her to do well there. But she had proven them wrong, and quickly.

And then there had been the meteoric rise, early in her career. The attack on Elysium had made her reputation - her single-handed stand against the slavers and pirates who had attacked the colony, and the spirit with which she'd managed to rally the civilians to protect themselves. It had also been a turning point for her, personally; Miranda had read an old log entry that she had made and deleted, one that she hadn't taken the proper care to fully erase. The attack, she'd said, had shown her how dangerous the aliens could be. Many different alien species had banded together to attack the human colony - batarian warlords, turian mercenaries, salarian battle technicians, a few raging krogans, all led by an angry turian warrior who had never fully accepted the end of the war. Pirates were not limited to one species. And it had been a natural conclusion, if misguided, that Shepard had come to in the end, that humans had to stick together against the aliens or else be destroyed.

Understandable, but naïve. Miranda wondered how many otherwise intelligent humans had forgotten the constant wars that humans had fought amongst themselves before they had been forced to put on a strong front for the sake of intergalactic relations. Even now humanity was not the unified race it had claimed to be for decades now. There was always tension, right below the surface. But it was easier for people to forget that now, after the First Contact War and its causalities. Easier to choose a new enemy to hate.

Everything had been engineered. Her test should have performed flawlessly. Shepard should have felt betrayed by the Alliance, who had sent her to attack the geth to appease the other races of the galaxy and who had subsequently abandoned Shepard and her crew to their fate. She should have been ready to appreciate her new association with Cerberus, and to begin to accept that what they had done was necessary and needed to be put aside. At best, she should have transferred the data to Cerberus High Command immediately; if nothing else her caution would have inspired her to allow EDI to try and decrypt the data first, which would have at least shown Shepard's willingness to keep the data out of the hands of their enemies.

Nothing in her psych profiles dictated that she was going to continue to back the Alliance. None of it made sense. And that meant that there had been something Miranda had missed, a variable she had failed to account for. Miranda was a perfectionist; she did not like to fail. She needed to find out what she'd done wrong, or she would never be able to keep Shepard under control -

Her private terminal chimed softly. She frowned and pulled it up on the terminal, stared at the new message for a moment, then closed it with a sigh. Honestly, she thought, giving the hidden camera that was currently studying her a quick glare - because yes, of course she knew exactly where it was and who was watching. She didn't mind that the Illusive Man was monitoring her; she had nothing to hide from him. But she did wish that he would be more discreet about it. Either way, she wasn't going to keep him waiting.

She stood up and left her office, ignoring the inane chatter amongst the crew in the mess hall as she strode toward the elevator.

\---

The Illusive Man was drinking when the connection went on-line. Miranda frowned, but resisted the urge to comment on it. She was sure that whatever cybernetic enhancements he'd authorized on himself were more than sufficient to keep his liver and lungs going. He looked up at her as she approached. "I just had a look at the encryption on this message, Miranda," he said without preamble. "I assume you handled it yourself?"

"Of course, sir," she answered, stopping a respectful distance away from where he sat.

"You did very well. With this encryption, it will be years before the Systems Alliance realizes that we've fed them false information, if they ever realize it at all."

Miranda took a deep breath, held it for a second. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

He raised an eyebrow. "For you? Of course."

"I hope you'll forgive me, but I'm hardly comfortable with such a compliment, given the circumstances."

"So I'd gathered." He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs. "I asked you here in the hopes of easing your mind about your performance, Miranda. Tell me your concerns."

Well, here it was. Best to get it over with. "Commander Shepard is behaving in a manner that I did not predict," she began. "Based on my psychological profile, she should not have transmitted that data to Alliance Command. I... the obvious conclusion is that there was some error with the psychological conditioning included in the Lazarus procedure."

"I looked over your procedures myself, Miranda. If you had missed anything, I wouldn't have hesitated to point it out."

"Then it must have been something that failed to imprint." She shook her head. "I missed something," she admitted. "I failed to factor something into the equation. I just... I can't see what. I've been over and over my notes, and nothing seems... out of place."

The Illusive Man sat up straight, tapped a few buttons on his own chair-mounted omni-tool. He seemed thoughtful, and very calm. "Your mistake," he said as he worked, "was thinking of this an equation, Miranda. Psychology is not considered an exact science, and for very good reason."

"I don't understand. Our research -"

"- is a good basis for understanding the human mind in general. It does not guarantee the full understanding of a specific human, especially an outlier." He lit a cigarette and took a puff before going back to his omni-tool. "And I think we can agree that Commander Shepard qualifies as an outlier."

"I recognize that, but..." She shook her head. "This is the woman who allowed the Council to be destroyed after they insulted and inconvenienced her. Every action she's taken since Elysium showed a tendency to take revenge when the opportunity became available."

"Yes, and you expected her to do the same now that she's on the Normandy. To be frank, Miranda, I hoped for the same. Not expected, mind you, but hoped. The difference between us is that I did not form any expectations with insufficient data." He looked back up at Miranda. "As for missing a variable, you might want to take a second look at this one."

He tapped the holographic display one final time, and a large screen opened up beside the Illusive Man, showing a dossier with a photograph. It was a young woman in a Marine's uniform, with long black hair and smiling eyes. Miranda recognized her at once, of course. She'd studied her service on the Normandy. "Sir, I'm not sure I follow," she said. "I factored Gunnery Chief Williams' death into Shepard's retraining."

"And the rest of her service, of course."

"All of it," she answered, too sharply. She knew that being angry at the Illusive Man was a dangerous thing. She also hated having her work questioned, even though she knew that something had gone wrong. Was she being too proud? Maybe. But she was also very good at what she did, and wanted everyone to know it. "Her service, her past history, her relationship with other squadmates. What she likely would have told Shepard on her own, what Shepard would have found out from other sources. I didn't neglect any of it."

"I am aware of that."

"Sir?"

"You seem to be forgetting once again that I had access to all of your files." He looked at the woman's face thoughtfully. "Ashley Williams was the second squadmate that Commander Shepard lost during her command of the Normandy SR-1. She remained the only Alliance soldier lost under that command until the Normandy's destruction. And yes, Shepard's reaction to her death at that time was predictable. It gave her still more incentive to destroy Saren, added revenge to her list of motivations. I believe that it was what happened after that surprised you, Miranda. Mostly because much of it happened in a place that even you could not have gathered intelligence on - inside of Shepard's mind.

"Saren and Sovereign were both destroyed. The Reapers remained, but Shepard was not allowed to hunt them, and even if she had been permitted I doubt that the Council would have given her enough resources to make any real difference. She had taken what revenge she could. And so her gaze turned inward - a process that I'm sure was hastened by her death." He smiled slightly. "I assume that you've studied near-death experiences, Miranda?"

"I know a few things," she said, flatly. "They seemed irrelevant. Shepard died too quickly for the neurochemical mechanism to activate."

"That is most likely true. But being near death does tend to cause individuals to rethink their lives. It appears that actual death did the same for Commander Shepard." He pulled up another file, one that Miranda recognized instantly - brainwave readings taken three months before Shepard's awakening. "And her mind did seem remarkably active before she was woken up. She might have been dreaming, or reliving her past. Either way, she had plenty of time to think."

Miranda took another deep breath, glad that she couldn't smell the Illusive Man's cigarette; the uplink was good, but not that good. And she'd always hated the stink of them. "You're saying," she said, "that now that Shepard's back, she's sorry for what she did before? Is she trying to atone for what she's done by playing nice with the Alliance?"

"Not just with the Alliance. And yes, it's the most likely theory, based on my own observations. There's still more data to collect before it can be confirmed." He waved the smoke aside and deactivated the projected screen. Williams' face disappeared, along with the accompanying data. "Either way, there should be no difficulties with the operation."

"Sir, I'm not convinced that's true." She thought of that sentence again, glaring and bright on her terminal screen. "Commander Shepard has shown through this test that she can and will inconvenience Cerberus by whatever methods she can use. What happens if she finds something that might actually damage our organization?"

"She might be able to set us back somewhat. She can't destroy us. I've worked too hard to protect Cerberus for one person to do that, even Commander Shepard." His lips quirked in another half-smile as he raised his hand, cycling through displays. Dossiers popped up in front of him, flickering too quickly for Miranda to catch details. They weren't all dossiers of humans - she thought that she caught sight of a haughty asari with a strange headdress, then a green-scaled drell, very briefly. But the images faded before she could see any more. "And if my theory continues to prove sound, I have other means by which we can control her. We'll simply need to give her common ground, causes to which she can relate. We can use them as leverage, or as a means of control, as the situation dictates."

"That won't stop her," Miranda argued. "She's too stubborn for that."

"Yes," he agreed. "But it should make her actions easier to predict, and that's the first step. And if we do this right, we'll be able to convince her to give us what we need most from her, when it really counts. The benefit from that will outweigh any costs we incur from her other actions." He pressed a few more buttons. "I just need you to keep an eye on our investment until that time comes. Minimize the damage that Shepard does if you can, but above that, keep her alive. Rebellious or not, we need her."

"Yes, sir," Miranda said, and might have said more - she wasn't sure what, but there was more on her mind. But the connection had been broken, and Miranda found herself standing in the Comm room, staring at the console as it powered down.

It had been a very strange conversation. If nothing else, it had affirmed the Illusive Man's power - which was probably what he'd meant it to be all along. Miranda needed to be humbled from time to time, along with the rest of his top-ranking operatives. She understood it, but that didn't mean she had to like it. And what he'd said at the end... that nagged at her. What had he meant, what they needed the most from her? Did he simply mean persuading Shepard not to abandon the mission? Miranda had seen no signs of that; Shepard might not care for Cerberus, but she was willing to work with them as long as the lives of thousands of human colonists were at stake. No, it had to be something else. But what? She didn't like not knowing these things.

Sighing, she turned and walked out of the comm room. She knew her duty; it was exactly as the Illusive Man had said. She needed to make sure that nothing happened to Shepard, and that the crew that she was assembling didn't collapse under the weight of its many conflicting personalities. If that meant that the Illusive Man had to keep them all in the dark... well, so be it.

But only for the moment. As soon as she could find a place where she could make some ultra-secure transmissions, she was going to have to search for some answers. If she wasn't going to get them from the Illusive Man, then sooner or later she'd find them herself. She hadn't gotten as far as she had by being ignorant.

**Author's Note:**

> Edited slightly - apparently the leader of the Elysium attack wasn't human after all. (It was a bug in the game.) Makes far more sense if he isn't, so I changed this.


End file.
